Bucks County's Republican Party, whose leaders were worked up enough last week to file a formal challenge to hundreds of absentee ballots solicited by Democrats, the GOP said fraudulently, has given up its challenge.

The party announced that while it had challenged 268 ballots as potentially fraudulent, and 1,400 others that were sent to the office via a Democratic absentee ballot campaign on the letterhead of the imaginary "Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office," it's no longer worried that any of those votes could change the outcome of any race.

That's what a Republican "shellacking," in the words of our nation's chief executive, will do for you.

Republican Mike Fitzpatrick trounced incumbent Democrat Patrick Murphy in the highest-profile countywide battle: the race for the 8th Congressional District. His final unofficial margin of victory was more than 19,000 votes.

One group of people breathing a big sigh of relief: the workers at the Bucks County Board of Elections, who would have had to preside over all those challenges.